Daniel Mendoza, M.D., Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine, has been honored with a 2014 Merck-ICAAC Young Investigator Award for his contributions to our understanding of protective immune responses against HIV infection. Robert Gilman, Johns Hopkins University, describes Mendoza as “a superb investigator and with impressive contributions to microbiology and infectious diseases.”

After earning his M.D. at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH), Lima, Peru, Mendoza was involved in the development of a novel assay for the rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis in resource-poor settings, and studied the epidemiology of H. pylori infection in Peru under the mentorship of Alberto Ramirez-Ramos and Fernando Llanos from UPCH, and Robert Gilman from Johns Hopkins University.

In 2004, he relocated to the U.S. to pursue a career as a physician-scientist. After being trained in internal medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he completed an infectious disease fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). At the NIH, he joined the HIV-Specific Immunity Section of Stephen Migueles and Mark Connors to study the mechanisms that underlie protective immunity against HIV. For his work, Mendoza was awarded a scholarship to attend the AIDS Vaccine 2011 Conference to deliver an oral presentation and received the competitive NIH Fellows Award for Research Excellence in 2012.

In 2012, Mendoza joined the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Medicine in the section of infectious diseases. Since starting his own laboratory, Mendoza’s focus has been to understand the mechanisms that underlie immune responses to glycan antigens.